There was a silence; Larissa came back and started speaking very fast to Demetrios in Greek. After a few minutes, she stood up and beckoned to him to follow.
“Excuse us,” he said.
Left alone with Mark Frost, Scarlett felt quite panicky, then told herself she was being ridiculous.
“So, what do you do?” she asked. “What sort of work are you in?” Trainee Trappist monk perhaps?
“Oh … I … I …” There was a pause, then: “Do research,” he said, as if suddenly alighting on an explanation.
“Oh, really? Into what?”
“Well … geography, I suppose you could call it.”
“So are you a lecturer?”
“Not exactly.”
He poured himself some more ouzo, offered the bottle to her. She shook her head. “No, thank you.”
Another silence. Then, “Filthy stuff, isn’t it?” he said. “I observed you not drinking it. I don’t like it either; only drink it to please Demetrios. Shall we …?” He looked over his shoulder into the house and then, confident of not being observed, tipped most of the bottle into one of the pots of budding geraniums.
“Probably kill the poor things,” he said, “but better them than us.”
Scarlett looked at him consideringly; he suddenly seemed a different person. “Indeed,” she said.
“So you must like it here a lot. To come back.”
“I absolutely love it. I was afraid it wasn’t as special as I remembered, but it was.”
“I always fear the same thing,” he said, not sounding in the least surprised, “but it always is.”
“You must like it very much,” said Scarlett, “to be building a house here.”
“Indeed,” he said, and lapsed back into total silence. After a minute or two, she decided her book would be more interesting and stood up.
“I think I’ll turn in,” she said. “I’m leaving early.”
“Ah. Getting Ari the Ferry out of his bed early. No mean feat.”
She giggled, surprised again at this flash of humour. “Is that your name for him?”
“It is. Well, I discovered his name was Aristotle and I couldn’t resist it. I’m part Welsh, you see, and in Wales everyone is Dai the Baker or Jones the Fish. It came from that.” He stopped and looked quite anxious, as if aware he had made too big a revelation. He’s afraid I’m going to start asking him about Wales, Scarlett thought. “Good night then,” she said, and saw the relief almost palpable on his face. He was a nutcase.
“Good night,” he said, standing up and shaking her hand formally. “Safe journey.”
Her last thought was that in the right circumstances, Mark Frost could—just possibly—be quite fun.
“I just … don’t like it. I’m sorry.”
“But, Matt, why not? What’s wrong with it?”
“He’s married, for a start.”
“Matt! He hasn’t seen her in years.”
“And how do you know that’s true?”
“Matt! For God’s sake. I don’t know, not for sure, but I trust him.”
“Well, I don’t.”
“Funny thing to say about your business partner.”
“That’s not what I meant and you know it.”
“Oh, Matt. Chill out. I’ve got an appointment; I’ll see you later.”
Driving into Chelsea, playing “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” by the Stones very loudly, Louise smiled to herself. She did enjoy rattling Matt. And he was seriously rattled by the fact that she was having an affair with Barry Floyd. She would have liked to think he was jealous, but it was a less flattering reason: he felt professionally threatened by it. He thought they’d gang up on him. Which was pathetic, really. She was too professional in the first place, and it stung that he might even consider it; and in the second, the partnership was much too successful to put at risk. Barkers Park was going up fast; WireHire were perfect tenants, making stage payments on the dot, agreeing to a bonus payment if the offices were finished ahead of time.
There was no way either of them would want to change the basis of any part of their working relationship.
Their personal one, however, had changed rather quickly.
“I mean, I thought he was pretty sexy,” Louise explained to Valerie Hill, who had become her confidante over the whole thing. “But I knew about Maura, of course—”
“The wife?”
“The wife. Yes. But—”
“Don’t tell me, in name only.”
“If living with another man means in name only, yes. They were married when he was eighteen and she was seventeen. She was in the family way, or told him she was, and then surprise, surprise, soon as they were married she had a miscarriage. He said he walked straight into it. Well, you would at eighteen, wouldn’t you?”
“I wouldn’t,” said Valerie. “So then what happened?”
“Well, then she did have three babies over the next five years or so, but then when Barry came to London, she stayed behind and then started playing around, got very friendly with this farmer—”
“Louise,” said Valerie, “are you sure it wasn’t him playing around? He doesn’t seem too much of an innocent to me.”
“Oh, no doubt he did too,” said Louise. “But now she’s living with the farmer over there, and …”
“Don’t tell me they’re going to get a divorce.”
“No, of course not. It’s not an option in Catholic Ireland. And even an annulment is virtually impossible unless you’re best friends with the pope. But a lot of people just do what Barry and Maura are doing and get on with their lives. He sends her money, of course, and the farmer is not exactly poor, as far as I can make out.”
The fact was that, in spite of her tough talking, Louise wasn’t entirely happy about getting involved with a married man. In the first place, she knew that, given the divorce laws in Ireland, it could never lead to anything permanent; and in the second, and more important, it was against her rather complex moral code. She really didn’t like girls who broke up marriages; in fact, she disapproved of them quite strongly.
But she was beginning to find her single lifestyle unsatisfactory; she didn’t dream of a home and babies, but wanted someone to share things with, not just her leisure time and her bed, but the contents of her head, her thoughts, her plans, her ambitions for herself, someone who understood her and what she was about. The only man who had ever fitted that bill was Matt Shaw; and if ever a man was locked into a marriage, however stormy, it was he.
But she discovered on their very first date that Barry Floyd filled this brief extraordinarily well.
And marriage, as far as she could see, was a straight and fast road downhill to a place where, even if you continued with your career, and earned as much or even more than your husband, he still remained in some mystical way the head of the household, and had to be waited on, fussed over, and asked permission if you wanted to be away or even work late.
She had been shocked by Eliza’s giving up work; she was fairly sure it had been at Matt’s insistence. She wasn’t sure which was her strongest emotion: distaste at Matt’s behaviour or disappointment in Eliza’s; either way, that assuredly wasn’t what she wanted.
That was the spring that Time magazine bestowed upon London the ultimate accolade of the title “the Swinging City,” when it became the most desirable place on earth, a modern-day Camelot, home of every kind of pleasure. That was the year that photographs of London—often also featuring the new model sensation Twiggy, with her childlike face, her boyish haircut, her spindly body—appeared in every newspaper in the world. That was when everyone fought to get in on the act, when the prime minister, Harold Wilson, was photographed with the Beatles, and the Queen’s sister (who had, after all, married into the Camelot fantasy herself) rocked to the Rolling Stones; when Michelangelo Antonioni chose London as the location for Blow-Up, his iconic tale of fashionable and degenerate society; when even Paris fashion turned tricksy and trendy, when Courrèges showed girl
ish rather than womanly models in short white boots and plastic dresses, and Paco Rabanne draped models’ forms with dizzily wonderful plastic mirrored jewellery; and that was the time when Eliza thought she was going mad, watching from her self-imposed exile, as every fashion editor in the world battled to find new designers, models, and photographers and to give them the freehold of their pages in ever wilder and more imaginative ways.
She would sit in the flat or in the park, Emmie in her pram, leafing through magazines in an agony of impotence, thinking how differently, how much more creatively, how much better, for Christ’s sake, she would have shown this dress, those colors, that designer. Occasionally she would go and meet Annunciata or Maddy or one of the other fashion editors for lunch, and come back feeling depressed, disenfranchised, cheated of her rightful place in this dazzling over-the-rainbow world.
“And I’m lonely,” she wailed to Maddy, one of the very few people to whom she would admit any flaw in her new life. “Matt’s never home before nine, and then he’s too tired to talk and, more important, listen.”
“Don’t you have friends with babies?” asked Maddy.
“Well, yes and no. Lots of acquaintances, girls I used to know, of course, and they ask me to tea and to meet them in the park, although lots of them have got nannies. It drives me crazy, Maddy; there they are, allowed nannies by their husbands, so they can leave their babies and go shopping and do dinner parties, and I’m not allowed one by mine to do something really important. God, it’s so unfair. So, actually, I prefer to spend my time alone with Emmie. Although I have got one friend,” she added, “much more interesting. I met her at the clinic.”
“The clinic?”
“Yes. I go there to have Emmie weighed and have her vaccinations and so on. It’s the highlight of my week, I tell you.”
“Oh, Eliza—”
“No, I’m serious. Anyway this girl is called Heather and …”
“Heather! That’s a pretty name.”
“Do you think so? Thanks.”
“Yes. And little Coral, how is she getting on?”
Coral was exactly the same age as Emmie; Eliza and Heather had eyed each other up for several afternoons at the clinic and, with the small class-crossing miracle that only babies can wreak, had each recognized something in the other that they liked, and had smiled at each other and said hallo occasionally, but this was the first time they had exchanged more than a few words.
“Oh … bit slow. She hasn’t gained much this week. She’s been poorly, had a bad cold, and they can’t eat, can they, when they’re all bunged up.”
“No. Emmie had a cold last month, that spell when it was really windy, you know, and I was so fed up with being indoors, I took her out anyway, and she got worse; in fact, she had a temperature. I felt so guilty—”
“Oh, I know; the guilt’s awful, isn’t it? I put Coral in the bath without testing it properly and it was—”
“Not scalding?” said Eliza in horror.
“No, no, almost cold. Poor little thing, I felt so ashamed, but I’d boiled it in the kettle because we’ve got no hot water, you see, and it wasn’t enough.”
“You’ve got no hot water?”
This was so unimaginable to Eliza she forgot to be tactful.
“Not running, no.” Heather gave Eliza a slightly cool look. “None of the flats in our house have. We’ve got the toilet on our floor, though, so we’re lucky. Girl in the basement, she has to come up three flights every night. She’s pregnant; how she’ll manage when she’s got the baby, I don’t know.”
“Poor girl.” Eliza struggled to sound concerned rather than horrified, but horrified was how she felt half the time talking to Heather, who lived in two rooms and a kitchenette and a shared bathroom in one of a row of old houses just off Clapham Common. Heather, whose husband, Alan, worked in an engineering factory, who had lost two babies before she had Coral and considered herself most wonderfully fortunate; Heather, who had less money for everything, food, rent, and the electric and gas meters each week, than Eliza spent on food and petrol for her car.
Heather wasn’t seeing much of swinging London, that was for sure.
She was small and pale, with long, straight light brown hair and enormous grey eyes, and Eliza found her much better company than her old friends; they chatted a couple of times over a cup of tea served from the antique urn in the clinic, and then one day had walked up the road together towards where Eliza had parked her car and Heather caught her bus.
“Blimey,” Heather had said, eyeing the white Ford Cortina that Eliza loathed and that Matt had insisted on, “that yours?”
“Um … yes. Yes, it is. Now, why don’t I give you a lift; then you won’t have to wait for the bus. We can put both the carry-cots on the backseat, look, and both sets of wheels in the boot. Come on; hop in.”
She always took Emmie to the clinic in a carry-cot because it could be lifted from its wheels and put in the car; the large Silver Cross pram that her mother had bought her didn’t actually get many outings. She felt pretty sure that Heather’s shabby pale blue carry-cot was probably all she had to cart Coral about in. And lifting it off the wheels to get it onto the bus … well, it was hard to imagine how she managed. It was hard to imagine how she managed at all.
She was shocked by the house Heather lived in; she helped her with the carry-cot wheels up the stairs to the second floor: the dark, dingy stairs covered with linoleum, the light green paint peeling off the walls, and the time-switch light going off repeatedly. It was cold, in spite of the sunshine outside, and the stairs smelt bad, a nasty mixture of cabbage and urine.
When they reached Heather’s door she looked at Eliza slightly apologetically and said, “I can’t ask you in, sorry; it’s all a bit of a mess.”
“That’s fine,” said Eliza. “I haven’t got time anyway. Bye, Heather, see you next week.”
As she walked back down the stairs, two teenage boys passed her; one of them was carrying a transistor radio, playing some pop music very loudly. She heard them laughing and shouting something as she shut the front door. If they were allowed to make that sort of noise, how could the neighbours complain about little Coral crying?
“It’s exactly that, because she’s a baby,” said Matt when she told him about it. “Lot of these landlords don’t allow children, any more than they allowed coloreds; she’s lucky to have a place at all.”
“Lucky! Matt Shaw, how can you possibly think someone living like that, sharing a lavatory, no running hot water, is lucky?”
“Because she is,” he said. “People like her, they have to take what they can get. At least the toilet’s on her floor.”
“Matt Shaw, you are such a foul, bloody hypocrite. Going on and on about your working-class credentials, and you sit there calmly telling me Heather’s lucky to have a toilet on her floor. How would you feel if that was us, with Emmie living there?”
“We wouldn’t be there for more than five minutes,” said Matt.
“Oh, is that right? And how would we get out of it?”
“Listen, Eliza, when my mum and dad got married they didn’t have a toilet at all, and for years I had my bath down at the municipal baths twice a week. I survived, and my dad worked his arse off to get that house sorted.”
“I don’t see how that makes Heather lucky.”
“She’s got a roof over her head, that’s why. It’s a starting point, OK. Mind you, she could lose it anytime now. Lot of big terraces in Clapham are being knocked down. Getting the tenants out is a nightmare. I feel for the landlords; I really do. All right, all right, only joking.”
“You are disgusting, you know that? And I just hope for your sake you don’t have any of those houses with signs up saying, ‘No children.’ God, you’re a nasty lot, you developers.”
“And what would you do if I did?”
“I’d leave you,” said Eliza.
It was, of course, completely ridiculous to be so completely—well, nearly—defeated by someone els
e. To be forced to do what that someone else wanted, often in the full knowledge that it was wrong; to hear herself giving in to entirely unreasonable demands; to find herself lacking in all the qualities—like common sense, willpower, and even humour—that she had thought she possessed in abundance; to become, quite simply, the sort of person she disapproved of and even despised. But confronted by this tyrant, this self-opinionated, hyperconfident creature whose wishes were forced upon her by a confusing mixture of icy determination and noisy aggression, she was lost. Defeated. She had no idea what to do.
And every day it got worse—and Emmie was not quite two.
“No, no, no, no, no,” the familiar, almost daily tantrum would begin.
“I’m sorry, but yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. Now, do what I say.”
“No!” The blue eyes blazed; a small foot stamped, hard, on the ground.
“Emmie, stop it. At once. If you won’t wear your coat, you’re not going.”
“I don’t want to go.”
“I don’t care. You’re going.”
“I’m not.” And she drew in her breath and held it, her eyes fixed on her mother in defiance, her face slowly turning bright red.
It was the stuff of nightmares.
Emmie could be neither coaxed nor threatened; she did what she wanted, and if anyone tried to stop her, she seemed prepared to die in the attempt. She had once made herself lose consciousness by holding her breath; she was equally capable of going on hunger strike and not eating for as long as it took. The longest she had managed was two and a half days, after which, of course, it had been Eliza who had cracked, afraid Emmie would become ill from lack of nourishment. Matt, who found the whole thing rather annoyingly amusing, said that Emmie was far too greedy to go seriously hungry; but then, he didn’t have to see her growing, if not faint, certainly a bit listless.
On the other hand, she was an enchanting child when things were to her liking; she was affectionate, interesting, and lively, her speech advanced and her manners charming—she shared her toys with a generous maturity that surprised Eliza, given that she was an only child. She just liked to do things her way.
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